Houdini Digital Asset – Procedural Montreal House

#News #Game Development #Houdini #IndieDev #Procedural Art #Unity

Luka Lescuyer has published a post on a tool she made with Houdini to create Montreal type houses used as a digital asset in Unity.

Luka Lescuyer has published a post on a tool he made with Houdini to create Montreal type houses used as a digital asset in Unity. The tool features parameters to change the size of the house and each module (balconies, doors, windows and other), their placements and colors.

The tool can also replace modules with external ones generated in other tools. One of the main things here is the ability to control the procedural UVs of the body of the house, how they adapt to the size changes, and how the height of the modules adapt to the number of bricks on the house material.

The artist created textures in Substance Designer with custom shaders created in Shaderforge to allow vertex color tint on base color.

MODULAR UV:

As the house is built by stacking one floor on top of each other, each one can be separated, which will make the unwrapping part a little easier.

I wanted each floor wall to match it’s height size to the 0-1 V space in the UVs (see image below). This way the texture will tile seamlessly between all the floors.

To achieve that, I used a for-each-loop to unwrap each primitive alone, this way I can have all my UV shells stacked on top of each other. Still It was not aligned to the top of my UV space (see image below). I needed to find a scale factor for my UVs to make them fit perfectly.

What I decided to do is isolate one wall UV shell, get the coordinates of it’s top point. If I divide 1 (which is the max value of the UVs V space) by the coordinate in V of this point, I get the scale factor needed to scale my UVs.

For example if the V coordinate of the top point of my UV shell is 0.7, the scale factor of the Uv would be 1/0,7=1,42xx.